HCH 1960

"The rich spirit of an English junk dealer and his family is challenged by the arrival of the tax collector in this humorous and heartwarming classic. Beneath the sunny, cloudless skies of Kent, the Larkin household -- Pop, Ma, and their six children -- enjoy the simple pleasures of life. Pop works as a junk dealer and keeps the farm to feed his brood, while Ma cooks the meals and minds the children. While the family may not seem to have much, they...

Val and Marian, two teenage school girls growing up in New York City, are misfits. Val, virtually ignored by her wealthy parents, lives at a boarding house where she is watched over by an arty but childless couple. Marian lives with her divorced mother and her mother's friend and rarely sees her father. Marian spends her afternoons eating sundaes at a local drugstore; Val disappears mysteriously each afternoon before school is let out. They don't...

In myth, Theseus was the slayer of the child-devouring Minotaur in Crete. What the founder-hero might have been in real life is another question, brilliantly explored in The King Must Die. Drawing on modern scholarship and archaeological findings at Knossos, Mary Renault's Theseus is an utterly lifelike figure-a king of immense charisma, whose boundless strivings flow from strength and weakness-but also one steered by implacable prophecy. The story...